Blah! Blah! in and about Iraq - 11 August 2014

-  The US 24/7 media circus is filled this morning with the bloviations of the Morning Joe types.  Neocon enthusiasts like Dan Senor and Max Boot were brought on the show to agitate for US commitment to another war in Iraq.  The claim is made that IS is an existential threat to the US.  what are we, Israelis, to make such a claim?  Boot quoted a supposed comment by Bonaparte to the effect that "if you start to take Vienna, then you should take it."  One would think that Boot would have learned from his earlier cheerleading about the Iraq War that Vienna is a lot harder to take than might be imagined from his university based viewpoint.  Joe Scarborough himself raved on.  He cannot grasp the fact that the US is not the world's hegemon.  He, and similar chickenhawks, yearn for such a role and have a very hard time believing that people will not simply obey an imperial ukase delivered from the White House.  In regard to Europe today Joe suggested that if the EU countries will not obey us they should be abandoned to their fate.  Clearly he sees all the world as made up of clients of the US.  He is a simpleton.  Tom Friedman was on this fool's show today to describe his recent interview with Obama.   In the course of this exposition he tried to explain to Joe that he had learned in the last ten years of the limits of US power.  Joe bellowed and carried on about that, trying to bully Friedman into saying that if only the US had armed the "secular, moderate, middle class" opposition to the Syrian Government then all would have been well.  Friedman told him there really was no such available group then and even more now as Joan Walsh said on Saturday.  "a moderate Syrian opposition fighter is as hard to find as a unicorn." Friedman said that Obama told him that the USG would be be arming far more FSA fighters if they could find them.   At the same time McCain snarls his enmity for Obama on every available platform and the Old Lady from South Carolina predicts another 9/11 occurrence if IS is not destroyed immediately.  Unfortunately some of the more simple among us are beginning to believe in the worldwide menace of IS.   IS is intent on building a salafist state in the Arab World.  We should resist that but yet more hysteria will not serve that purpose and we should take note of the fact that the same people who instigated the last war in Iraq are pushing for another major US commitment.

- The Yazidis are rescuing themselves from Sinjar Mountain with the assistance of US air strikes and a small number of Pesh Merga and Kurdish fighters from Syria.  Some 20,000 Yazidis have made their way north into the Kurdish held NE wing of Syria.  It seems unlikely that Erdogan will let them into Turkey since he is an ally of IS. 

- There is an interesting contrast in the way the Richard Nixon gave up the US presidency peacefully in the Watergate crisis and the way Maliki now threatens a coup in Baghdad.  Should there not be a lesson in that?

-  The media are trying to make something of the CIA's executive agency in the direct delivery of armaments to the KRG.  This is a big nothing.  Specific US law permits delivery of military materiel to the Iraqi government but not to the KRG.  By making the delivery a covert action under the authority of  a presidential finding authorized by the National Defense Act, that legal problem is avoided. 

- The claim is being made that a few US air strikes have halted IS advances oward Irbil.  No.  IS troops reaction thus far has been limited to taking their black flags off their vehicles,  The two little towns that IS lost over the weekend are insignificant.  pl

Comments

[Max]

Dear Pat,
I highly recommend to you and to all the followers of your blog a new book that is just out, "Iraq After America" by LT COL (now COL) Joel Rayburn, published by Hoover University Press. A highly skilled intelligence officer, he defines the fault lines in Iraq with precision and even though he stopped his writing in 2013, all that is happening in 2014 is clearly foreseen, including the emergence of the DAISH (Islamic State). And if his line of analysis is correct, Maliki will deal with his current crisis (designation of al-Abadi to form a new government) as he has in the past and once again foil US policy, although I am sure he would hope that he is wrong.

[dan]

Not seen any evidence for that thus far - but IS are in the potentially awkward position of having to combat entropy as much as anything else. The materiel that they have captured will degrade, become difficult to service, expire or be consumed over time, and their principal mode of replenishment is the capture of more stock from the Iraqi and Syrian militaries ( the pace of acquisition has slackened since the end of June ). IS cannot afford to get bogged down in an attritional campaign.

[mike]

30 T-55s and five to ten T-72s per Daily Sabah. They think the chance of IS having M-1s is slim. But there is one unsubstantiated claim out there that says an M-1 was used at Mosul Dam. Could be smoke, could be mis-identification, but who knows?

[alba etie]

Brigadier General Ali
I just googled Turkey recongnizes Kurdistan and found several references to recent Turkish support for an independent Kurdistan . I also think Turkey will soon be course correcting regarding its support of ISIL. We shall see.

[LJ]

Thanks for responding. It may be real, but who helped make it real? I still propose that ISIS is not blowback but an intended policy goal.